New zines! New zines! How do they get here?

Have you ever wondered how the zines in our collection make their way from the artists to our library shelves? Well, I hope you have because we’re here to dispel a little of the mystery! The particular zines in this haul were all bought from the 2014 Zinefest in Wellington, where our library zine coordinator Monty spends the day buying up loads of new zines for our collection. It’s an exciting time of year and a big job to get them all processed, but here it is recorded for you all!

First of all, here’s part of the huge stack of new additions:

Our first step is to choose a zine. I liked the lettering and illustration on the cover of this one. Then we put a pink “zines” sticker and a barcode. All our zines get these stickers, regardless of what kind of zine they are.

Here’s Steph using a super fancy barcode ruler (it’s a piece of paper) to measure where the barcode should go so that our scanners will be able to read it. This was a big job so as you can see, we needed snacks!

This picture features my own zine, Sock Review!

Next, if it’s a zine by a New Zealander, it gets this koru sticker. You’ll see these stickers all throughout our collection indicating NZ authors.

Next we have to decide what kind of zine we’re processing. The categories we put our zines into are literary, personal, DIY, arts, comics and miscellaneous. Because this zine contains interviews with musicians, I put it into the “arts” category.

After that, we manually input the zine data into our spreadsheet. You can find that spreadsheet over on the Zines popular topic page, and you can search the document for title and author if you’re looking for something specific!

And then the zine goes onto the shelf! Most go on this shelf at Central, but some go to our zine collection at Newtown Library instead. Then we just have a hundred or so more zines to do this for!